Archive for September 2010

At long last, it flowered on a Saturday! So I managed to do some rough studies on this short-lived orchid which only flowers for a day, exactly nine days after a drop in temperature. This is a very common orchid, you will see it growing in trees all round Kuching but its flowering somehow never coincides with my free- to- paint days until last Saturday.

It wasn’t pleasant drawing this orchid either. I had a couple of sprays in front of me in a vase and it filled the whole room with a strong scent. The smell got very thick and nose tickling early in the morning, reminiscent of a thousand cockroaches frolicking about in a field of jasmine. Yes, you read that right, cockroaches, the big brown ones.

I am hoping to develop this into a nice big watercolour of the whole orchid plant with sprays of flowers cascading down like upside down pigeons.

Here’s a wonderfully decorated surau in one of the kampungs in Kuching, shining in the white mid-morning light.

I painted this picture with Holbein’s aureolin, a true warm yellow. Despite dire warnings in various watercolour books about aureolin, it hasn’t gone brown yet. I hope the formula for this pigment has been changed because I bought a couple of tubes before I read about the warning about aureolin’s tendency to turn brown!